1. Field of the Invention
The present general inventive concept relates to a printing control apparatus and a printing control method, and more particularly, to a printing control apparatus to easily set a hierarchical printing option and a printing control method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Usually, an image forming apparatus refers to a device which prints print data generated by a terminal such as a computer on a printing medium. Such an image forming apparatus may be a copy machine, a printer, a fax machine, or an MFP (multifunction peripheral) which integrates the above functions in one device.
Image forming apparatuses which have been recently introduced include an extensible markup language (XML) paper specification (XPS) emulator and thus support not only print data written in a page description language (PDL) such as a post script (PS) or a printer command language (PCL) but also print data of an XPS file.
An XPS file is an electronic file with a fixed layout which enables a document format to be maintained and a file to be shared. The XPS file refers to a file in which all resources needed for a corresponding document or a corresponding operation are systemized in a directory structure, a reference relationship between the resources is written using an XML, and then all of the data and resources are compressed in a zip format. Such XPS file has a tree structure or hierarchal structure as illustrated in FIG. 9.
Specifically, the XPS file is formed in a hierarchical structure having a job level, a document level, and a page level. Each of the document level and the page level may include a plurality of documents and pages, and different printing options may be applied to each document and page.
A printer driver provides a user interface (UI) through which a printing option is set on a document to be printed. A user may set a printing option regarding various items such as paper size, paper type, paper container, double sided printing, stapler, offset, overlay, watermark, and pages per sheet to be applied to the document using the UI provided by a printer driver.
A user may set a combined printing option by selecting various printing options, and pre-set and pre-store frequently used printing options as favorite printing options.
However, favorite printing options that a conventional printer driver supports cause inconvenience, in that the favorite printing options are applied only when the printing options are set on the entire document, and it is impossible to use the printing options when the printing options are set on each level of an XPS file.